برون سپاری فرآیندهای کسب و کار پیش پرداختی : کیفیت، اطلاعات و ارتباط با مشتری

We examine the recent supply chain phenomenon of outsourcing front-end business processes in this paper. Few, if any, of the existing theories provide satisfactory explanation for the rapid growth in this area. We use a model proposed by Sridhar and Balachandran [Sridhar, S.S., Balachandran, B.V. 1997. Incomplete information, task assignment, and managerial control systems. Manage. Sci. 43(6), 764–778] to determine the factors that might contribute to this phenomenon. Our analysis reveals that the ability of the vendor to forecast the task environment without bias and to gain sophistication in interpreting contract terms might make the firm indifferent between outsourcing and retaining front-end processes in-house. We validate our findings against the work of Apte and Mason [Apte, U.M., Mason, R.O., 1995. Global disaggregation of information-intensive services. Manage. Sci. 41(7), 1250–1262], who develop a theoretical framework to identify criteria for companies to select services to be outsourced. They base their decisions predominantly on the nature of “customer contact.” The combined theories are shown to provide a rich framework for identifying customer-facing tasks that can be outsourced.

The recent trend of outsourcing front-end processes, such as customer care and marketing services, is a paradigm shift in how firms structure their business processes. This trend is part of a larger phenomenon of outsourcing business processes that began more than a decade ago with the outsourcing of IT. It now includes the outsourcing of customer care processes, finance and accounting functions, as well as travel-related and real estate management services. The outsourcing of one or more of these specific functions or business processes to a third-party vendor has come to be called business process outsourcing (BPO) (Gartner Dataquest, 2003). The latest Nasscom-Mckinsey report-2005 (Nasscom-Mckinsey Report, 2005) states that the addressable market for global offshoring exceeds USD 300 billion of which USD 110 billion will be offshored by 2010. India has been one of the main beneficiaries of BPO spending. The BPO industry in India is growing at a compounded annual growth rate greater than 25%, is expected to generate export revenues of USD 60 billion by 2010, accounts for 1% growth per year of India’s GDP and for 44% of export growth by 2010 (Nasscom, 2003). A snapshot of the outsourcing industry is provided in Table 1 and Table 2. Table 1 reports the worldwide BPO spending for different business processes. Sales and Marketing, which are front-end processes, constitute about 26% of the worldwide BPO spending in 2001 and are expected to account for about 23% in 2006. Table 2 lists the number of Indian companies that provide different BPO services. Front-end processes constitute 46.3% of the services offered by Indian firms. Moreover, as of March 2003, customer care alone contributed to 30% of the BPO revenues (Nasscom, 2003).

Received theory suggests that incomplete information leads to firms preferring to outsource their back-end rather than their front-end processes. This result can be attributed to the fact that the principal does not have sufficient incentive to reveal the task environment to the uninformed agent when that agent is assigned the front-end task. The agent is aware of this. Thus, it becomes costly to persuade him to accept a contract without offering additional inducements. However, our analysis shows that the effect of incomplete information can be mitigated under several conditions as summarized in Table 3. The decision to outsource front-end tasks should also take into account the nature of customer contact and the information intensity. If the contact is symbolic and the information intensity is high, then there is greater potential for outsourcing such tasks. Acknowledgements We thank the reviewers and the editors for the suggestion to relate our work more closely to the service system design literature. This led us to validate our findings against Apte and Mason’s model. We also thank the reviewers for several comments that improved the exposition.